Although downplayed by most media accounts and popular financial analysts, crippling bank losses from foreclosure flaws appear to be imminent and unavoidable.

The defects prompting the “RoboSigning Scandal” are not mere technicalities but are inherent to the securitization process. They cannot be cured. This deep-seated fraud is already explicitly outlined in publicly available lawsuits.

There is, however, no need to panic, no need for TARP II, and no need for legislation to further conceal the fraud and push the inevitable failure of the too-big-to-fail banks into the future.Read more...

As I sit beside my 92-year-old father in his hospital bed in Kingsport, Tennessee, there are reminders all around me of why I left my job in the insurance industry to become an advocate for health-care reform — and why all Americans have reasons to be grateful that many provisions of the reform bill that became law six months ago are taking effect now.

To begin with, there is my dad himself. He must take costly medications every day. This year he and millions of other older Americans fell into the Medicare Part D “doughnut hole.”

They have to spend thousands of dollars for medicines they need before their drug benefit will kick back in. The new law has already begun to reduce their pharmacy expenses.Read more...

Lordy lordy. It would appear that investigative reporter Jane Mayer has put the final nail in the coffin of the myth that the “tea party” movement is some up from the ground working stiff “grass roots” populist movement composed of little guy Democrats, Republicans and independents who are simply angry at government.

In the latest edition of the New Yorker Mayer, with meticulous research and an eye for keen detail, has brought the shadow players, the big money men, the string pullers and big time manipulators behind much of what is happening today in American right wing politics out into the blazing sun with a long investigative report called “Covert Operations: The Billionaire brothers who are waging war against Obama.”Read more...

Editor's Note: this opinion piece originally ran August 11, 2010 in SkyValleyChronicle.com

In a broadcast news report Tuesday night on Seattle’s KOMO-TV about Sultan’s latest political football fight, a veteran reporter for the station let slip into the story a very dated and no longer factual image of the Sky Valley town as “little more than a speed trap on the way to Stevens Pass.”

The report was about long time local Sultan resident and real estate agent Bart Dalmasso leading an effort via petition to disincorporate (dissolve) the town as a legal entity and send it back into Snohomish “unincorporated” county land.

Bart thinks it will save the local taxpayers a fair amount of money in the lean times of this still lingering Great Recession. He could be right.Read more...

The housing depression will last for a decade or more. This is by design.

The Fed has been working with the banks to withhold inventory so prices do not fall too fast or too far. That way the banks can manage their write-downs without slipping into insolvency. But what's good for the banks is bad for the country.

Capital impairment at the banks, means no credit expansion in the near-term. It means the economy will continue to contract, unemployment will remain high, and deflation will push down wages and prices. Everyone will pay for the mortgage-backed securities scam that was engineered by the banks.Read more...